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Install

Requirements

  • QGIS 3.28 or newer. Developed and tested on 4.0.1; 3.28+ should work but is untested.
  • Platform: Windows and macOS. Windows is tested. macOS is expected to work — the code is portable — but is unverified. Linux is a work in progress and currently non-functional: the plugin installs and reads data, but a change map produces no output on the Linux builds tested so far. Track it in the repo before relying on it there.
  • Nothing else. GDAL, numpy and scipy all ship with QGIS, which is the whole reason the plugin dropped rasterio — there is no pip install step and no OSGeo4W shell.
  • No account, no API key, no Earth Engine. The data is read straight from public cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs.

Add EMBED-CD's own repository once and it installs, updates and reinstalls from inside QGIS — no downloading, no file copying, which matters if the machine you run it on is a remote one.

  1. Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins… → Settings.
  2. Tick Show also experimental plugins (EMBED-CD is flagged experimental until 1.0, and without this it will not appear).

  3. Under Plugin Repositories, Add… — name it EMBED-CD, URL:

    https://agraham9966.github.io/EMBED-CD/plugins.xml

  4. Go to All, search for EMBED-CD, and Install Plugin.

Later versions then show up under Upgradeable on their own.

Install from the zip

  1. Download embed_cd_qgis-<version>.zip from Releases.
  2. In QGIS: Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins → Install from ZIP, choose the file, Install Plugin.
  3. A toolbar button and a Raster → EMBED-CD menu entry appear. Either opens the panel.

To upgrade, install the newer zip over the old one.

The first run

The first job downloads the AlphaEarth tile index once: 78 MB, reduced to a ≈3.6 MB cache that every later run loads in well under a second and works offline. It lives in your QGIS QGIS profile, under cache/embed_cd. Reinstalling the plugin keeps it as long as the profile survives, so you never re-download it.

After that, nothing is stored except the tiles of the areas you actually run.

Where results go

By default a run writes to a temporary folder that is deleted when QGIS closes. Set Save to: and the run becomes permanent, resumable, and reopenable later with Open… — including its polygons, labels and classifier, not just the picture.

Common issues

"needs either pyarrow or a GDAL built with the Parquet driver" — you should not see this: the tile index is downloaded pre-built and read with numpy, which every QGIS has. It only appears if that download is blocked and your QGIS also lacks both Parquet readers. If it does, either unblock agraham9966.github.io, or install pyarrow into the Python QGIS uses (sudo apt install python3-pyarrow on Debian/Ubuntu).

Find any bugs? Please open an issue with your platform and QGIS version.